Usama bin Ladin’s “Father Sheikh”:

ideological interference, and he quit teaching at government schools entirely. 62 While
the primary sources are silent about Khalis’s activities during most of the 1960s, the
narrative thread of his life can be picked up again in 1966, when Khalis helped to form
an “Islamic group” in Nangarhar. 63 Although it is unknown if this is the same group
that Khalis cofounded with the journalist Minhajuddin Gahiz, it seems likely that these
two men were already connected by this point. 64
The Growth of an Islamic Political Opposition in Afghanistan
There was a flurry of quiet Islamist organizing activity led by ‘ulama, professors and
students in all of the major population centers of Afghanistan in the 1960s. In Kabul,
much of this activity centered around Professor Ghulam Niazi, who had returned to
Afghanistan in the 1950s to teach after receiving a Master’s Degree from the famous al‐
Azhar University in Egypt. 65 Professor Ghulam Niazi founded an underground Islamic
organization in 1965, 66 and by 1969 this group had given birth to the “Muslim Youth”
and prepared the way for what would become the first mujahidin political party in the
1970s. 67
62 Ahmadzai, 15‐16.
63 Muhammad (2007), 26.
64 Minhajuddin Gahiz was an important writer and political activist who helped to cofound a mysterious
group called the Hizb al‐Tawabin, and eventually created the journal Gahiz to help counteract the
influence of the leftist publications, which were then becoming increasingly prominent in Afghanistan.
65 Al‐Azhar is one of the most prestigious religious universities in the Muslim world; students are often
willing to travel thousands of miles to study there. It is often assumed because of the activities of the
Muslim Brotherhood around al‐Azhar in the mid‐20th century that the Afghans who traveled to study
there were influenced by the Brotherhood’s ideology. In the case of Niazi and several other Afghan
scholars who studied at al‐Azhar, this appears to be essentially correct.
66 Ahmadzai, 25–26.
67 The Muslim Youth was an organization largely made up of Kabul University students interested in
becoming active in politics, and it was connected to Professor Ghulam Niazi’s other political circles. The
ideological orientation of this group can effectively be termed “Islamist,” in part because of the influence
on this group of Niazi’s circle of professors who were educated at al‐Azhar University in Egypt and had
ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. This group eventually became much more radical than the more
secretive group of lecturers like ‘Abd al‐Rab Rasul Sayyaf and Burhanuddin Rabbani, and the Muslim
Youth formed the backbone of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s base of support when he built his own political
party later in the 1970s. Khalis’s eldest son was apparently active in an offshoot of this movement
operating in northern Afghanistan, and Khalis frequently met with students during the time period when
the Muslim Youth was becoming more widespread and powerful. David Edwards even says that Khalis
was “aligned with the Muslim Youth Organization in the early 1970s.” See David Edwards. Before Taliban:
Genealogies of the Afghan Jihad. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002), 247. For a
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